NORWALK >> When Marianne Michael’s beloved dog Elise came down with lung cancer, Michael thought she would just keep her pet as pain-free as possible for the rest of her life.

“I wasn’t very comfortable with the idea of surgery for Elise at her age because she’s 12½,” Michael, who lives in West Hartford, said of her border collie-Samoyed mix. “I decided just to spoil her and keep her comfortable.”

But when the chance came up to enroll her dog in a study of a new cancer vaccine, Michael was happy to take part.

Dr. Gerald Post of the Veterinary Cancer Center in Norwalk and Mark Mamula, professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine, hope their study of a cancer vaccine will not only provide an effective treatment for dogs, but ultimately for people, too.

“These are not laboratory-bred dogs,” Mamula said of the study candidates. “Much like a human clinic, these dogs are walking in the door with different stages of cancer.”

Since she’s had cancer, Elise has had less energy, although she’s never been a really lively dog, said Michael, who also has another dog, Mr. Lucky. “Elise is very important to me and I’m really happy to have her participating in this study,” she said.

Since Elise has started the treatment, “Her coughing has abated, her appetite is better,” said Michael. “I don’t know how much longer she has, but I think she’s doing very well.”

“Dog cancers very closely resemble human cancers in many ways,” Mamula said. The standard treatments are similar, too: radiation, chemotherapy and monoclonal antibody therapies, in which the body’s immune system creates antibodies to attack the tumor. The experimental vaccine most closely resembles this immunotherapy, he said.

“We synthesize tumor proteins in the lab and we put them together in a vaccine formulation,” Mamula said. “It provokes or triggers … your white blood cells to make antibodies against the tumor.”

Marisa Rockwell of Guilford enrolled Valo, her pitbull mix, in the study and said, “I’m pretty excited about it. It’s an awesome opportunity for me and my dog — basically taking a step in history for curing cancer,” Rockwell said. “I don’t have any kids so he means the world to me. He’s my heart and soul.”

Valo, who is 10 years old, accompanies Rockwell to the gym every day as well as on hikes.

“He’s very playful. You couldn’t ask for a better dog,” Rockwell said. She brought him to the clinic because Valo has two kinds of cancer, transitional cell carcinoma and soft tissue sarcoma.

While most dogs with cancer are eligible to participate, Mamula said the study is mostly focused on cancers of the breast and colon, as well as osteosarcoma and nasopharyngeal cancer, which affects dogs more than humans.

While the therapy has been effective in mice, it’s still too early to tell its success on dog cancers, but Mamula and Post are hopeful. Phase one trials are “really designed to show tumor reduction,” Mamula said.

Post, whose Norwalk clinic is “one of the largest veterinary oncology centers in the country,” calls the study “fantastic.”

“It’s an early-phase study but the technology that Mark has developed is incredibly exciting,” Post said. “The biologic behavior of cancer in dogs and cats is incredibly similar to cancer in people.”

Post said, “We want everybody whose pet has cancer to at least come visit us and hear their options.” The website is www.VCChope.com.

He said that because of dogs’ shorter lifespan, “We can get results so much more rapidly. … “We’ll know whether treatments work or don’t work in a much more rapid timeframe.”

Mamula knows what it’s like to lose a dog to cancer. He and his wife, WTNH-TV anchor Ann Nyberg, had to put down their yellow Labrador, Savannah, three years ago when she suffered from a mass too close to her heart for surgery.

“Dog people are a bit more enthusiastic. They’re literally family members to most of us,” Mamula said. “She was the best dog you could ever want.”

Mamula followed up an interview with an email in which he wrote about his family’s experience with Savannah.

“These animals do not, and cannot, vocalize the pains of their disease,” Mamula wrote. “This makes the early detection of their cancers difficult in even the most skilled hands. Savannah’s last night in our home was particularly moving. She knew that it was time to let her go, in yet another gesture of grace to say ‘it’s ok dad, we spent great time in our lives together.’ At that point in her illness, she moved with careful, deliberate steps. Her last night was restless. I’d like to think this was her way to spend some remaining quality time with those who loved her.”

The next day, the family took Savannah, who was almost 10 years old, to the beach “to wander through the oceanfront grasses and enjoy the calm and cool March waters.” They then brought her to the veterinarian for the last time.

“Clearly, my experience with Savannah’s cancer provides great motivation to solve what affects many in the canine and human worlds,” Mamula wrote. “She provides energy to our studies of an otherwise difficult medical condition, one where existing therapies too often fall short of a cure.”

While Mamula and Post would like to accept many more dogs into the study, they are “working on a limited budget,” Mamula said. “We have to work very hard to acquire funding for studies like this. This is an underfunded study at this point.” To keep it going, Post has provided much of his time pro bono.

So far, in two months of research, they have enrolled 15 to 20 dogs and hope to add that many each month.

The vaccine research is “founded on really good mouse studies,” Mamula said. “We hope and are enthusiastic that all these same things will happen in dogs and, if we’re fortunate enough, to get these into human trials.” That would be at least a year away, however.

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